AURORA, KY - If you’re wondering where the music of troubadour
Woody Pines comes from, look to the streets. It was on the streets as
a professional busker that Woody first cut his teeth, drawing
liberally from the lost back alley anthems and scratchy old 78s of
American roots music, whether country blues, jugband, hokum, or
hillbilly. That's
the refreshing sound Woody Pines brings to the Kenlake Hot August
Blues Festival, Friday evening, August 24th
at the Kenlake State Park Amphitheater.

Heavy
rollicking street performances are the key to some of today’s best
roots bands, like Old Crow Medicine Show (Woody and OCMS’ Gill
Landry used to tour the country in their own jugband), and they’re
the key to Woody’s intensely catchy rhythms, jumpy lyrics, and
wildly delirious sense of fun. Woody traveled all over the streets of
this country, road testing his songs, drawing from the catchiest
elements of the music he loved and adding in hopped-up vintage
electrification to get that old country dancehall sound down right.

That’s why the songs on his new most recent release, Woody Pines (on underground label Muddy Roots Recordings) are so hot.
This is gonzo folk music, the kind of raise-the-rafters, boot-shakin’
jump blues that used to be banging out of juke joints all over the
South in the late 1940s, but now it’s burning into the ear holes of
a younger generation of Nashville kids, all looking for music with
deep roots and something to hang on to.

It’s tempting to call Woody Pine’s newest music
“rockabilly,” and in fact he recorded at Sputnik Studios in
Nashville, famous for recording rockabilly and psych-twang heroes JD
McPherson, Jack White, and Sturgill Simpson. But it might be more
accurate to call Woody’s new songs “hillbilly boogie;” a rarely
remembered genre of American music made famous by the Delmore
Brothers. Hillbilly boogie sits at the exact moment when the buzzed-
out, electrified hillbilly country music of Appalachia (which itself
drew heavily from country blues), first hit the sawdust-floored
honky-tonks of old Nashville and Memphis. It was the moment exactly
before the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. Woody writes with a wink to
this critical time on songs like “Anything for Love” and “New
Nashville Boogie,” drawing in modern references at will to make his
points. He also dives deep into the tradition, drawing up gems like
the old gangsta- folk song “Make It to the Woods” from the
Mississippi Sheiks. In Woody’s music, there’s never an idea that
roots music should be a recreation of an older time. Instead, he taps
the vein of this music that’s still beating today, finding common
ground with the old hucksters and bar-hounds who created the music in
the first place.

When Woody Pines sings “when the train rolls by, I get
a faceful of rain,” this isn’t some hipster dilettante twisting a
faux-handlebar mustache and singing about old-timey railroads, this
is a dedicated student of Woody Guthrie who used to hop freight
trains to get from town to town. This is serious roots music that’s
as much a way of life as an aesthetic choice. This music isn’t for
dabblers; you gotta feel it in your bones. Let Woody Pines help.

The Kenlake Hot August Blues Festival is set for
Thursday through Saturday, August 23-25 at Kenlake State Park in
Aurora, Kentucky. Discount tickets are available at KenlakeBlues.com

Charities which will benefit from this year's Hot August
Blues Festival include The Shriners, who will be operating festival
shuttles with all tips and proceeds going to the Shriners' Childrens'
Hospitals, and the Knights of Columbus.